Fantastically Wrong: The Legend of the Homicidal Fire-Proof Salamander

A salamander relaxing in a fire, just minding its own business, is rudely prodded by a shirtless man. "A salamander lives in the fire, which imparts to it a most glorious hue," reads the caption. Welcome to the wonderful world of alchemy. Wikimedia

In the first century AD, Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder threw a salamander into a fire. He wanted to see if it could indeed not only survive the flames, but extinguish them, as Aristotle had claimed such creatures could. But the salamander didn’t … uh … make it.

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Yet that didn’t stop the legend of the fire-proof salamander (a name derived from the Persian meaning “fire within”) from persisting for 1,500 more years, from the Ancient Romans to the Middle Ages on up to the alchemists of the Renaissance. Some even believed it was born in fire, like the legendary Phoenix, only slimier and a bit less dramatic. And that its fur (huh?) could be used to weave fire-resistant garments.

Part of the problem, it seems, is that in addition to disproving the salamander’s powers, Pliny also wrote extensively that it had such powers—and then some. His Natural History, which has survived over the centuries as a towering catalog of everything from mining to zoology, describes the salamander as such: “It is so chilly that it puts out fire by its contact, in the same way as ice does. It vomits from its mouth a milky slaver [saliva], one touch of which on any part of the human body causes all the hair to drop off, and the portion touched changes its color and breaks out in a tetter,” a sort of itchy skin disease.

Medieval bestiaries—encyclopedias that cataloged life on Earth—propagated the myth that salamanders love carrots. Are those carrots? Maybe they’re flames. Wikimedia

Some 500 years later, Saint Isidore of Seville wrote that while other poisonous animals strike their victims individually, the salamander slays “very many at the same time; for if it crawls up a tree, it infects all the fruit with poison and slays those who eat it; nay, even if it falls in a well, the power of the poison slays those who drink it.” He also confirmed that it’s immune to the effects of fire.

So right away the salamander was mythologized as both a miraculous survivor and a menace. Indeed, later on in the 1200s, an English writer told of one laying waste to Alexander the Great’s army simply by swimming in a river they drank from. All told, 4,000 soldiers and 2,000 horses supposedly perished after consuming the salamander’s dirty bath water. Which would be pretty embarrassing, if only it were true.

Now, it was likely Europe’s fire salamander, with its vivid yellow-on-black coloration, that served as the inspiration for the legend, according to Nosson Slifkin in his book Sacred Monsters. As you might assume from its conspicuous colors, this species is in fact quite poisonous, secreting a neurotoxin to deter predators. And if it doesn’t feel like waiting to be attacked, it can actually fire this secretion at its approaching enemies. While the toxin can cause skin irritation in humans, it’s far from capable of poisoning 4,000 soldiers. But it’s likely this poisonous nature was simply scaled up for such myths.

Europe’s glorious fire salamander has bright markings that warn predators that it’s poisonous, and dead eyes that say, “I’m going through a rough patch in my life right now.” Didier Descouens/ Wikimedia

A few centuries later, none other than Leonardo Da Vinci added another curious characteristic to the salamander’s repertoire, claiming it “has no digestive organs, and gets no food but from the fire, in which it constantly renews its scaly skin.” The alchemist Paracelsus later confirmed this as its diet, elevating the salamander to the status of one of the four “elementals” that he substituted for the classical elements earth, fire, air, and water—the salamander of course being fire.

Salamanders: The Furry Fire-Proof Heroes of the Working Man

It was a bit earlier, in the Middle Ages, when the legend of the fire-proof salamander picked up another facet: asbestos, a highly fire-resistant mineral with fibers we now know can absolutely devastate our lungs, leading to mesothelioma and other awful diseases. You see, before we foolishly packed our modern buildings with the stuff, in the ancient world it was woven into royal garments. According to Pliny, because it doesn’t burn, it was used to wrap the dead on funeral pyres, resulting in pure ash unsullied by charred fabric.

Curiously, Marco Polo noted “the real truth is that the Salamander is no beast, as they allege in our part of the world, but is a substance found in the earth.” He relates the experiences of a Turkish acquaintance in China, where the man dug up “Salamander,” or asbestos as we know it, and processed its fibers into napkins. “When first made these napkins are not very white, but by putting them into the fire for a while they come out as white as snow. And so again whenever they become dirty they are bleached by being put in the fire.”

A comedy of errors led naturalists, including Conrad Gesner in his Historiae Animalium encyclopedia shown here, to depict the salamander as furry. Well, it was amusing for everyone besides the salamander, which prides itself on its diligent shaving regimen. Source: Archive.org

According to the 17th-century British polymath Sir Thomas Browne, asbestos was known metaphorically as “salamander’s wool,” based on the legendary fireproofing of the critter. But this was misinterpreted as being literal, so medieval bestiaries—the oftentimes vast encyclopedias of life—portrayed the salamander as furry (just furry, not a furry, thankfully).

Far from dismissing the salamander’s powers entirely, Browne goes on to break down its potential for surviving flames or even extinguishing coals, arguing that the critter’s moistness and mucus can indeed protect it from burning up, however briefly. “And therefore some truth we allow in the tradition: truth according unto Galen, that it may for a time resist a flame, or as Scaliger avers, extinguish or put out a coal: for thus much will many humid bodies perform: but that it perseveres and lives in that destructive element, is a fallacious enlargement.” (It’s safe to assume that salamanders do indeed fare somewhat better than creatures that actually have fur, but to my knowledge no modern experiments have been done to confirm this on account of, you know, ethics and all.)

The salamander’s association with asbestos landed it in the logo of the International Association of Heat and Frost Insulators and Allied Workers in the early 20th century. The union retains it to this day, and probably has a full-time staffer to answer calls asking why the organization would pride itself on cooking salamanders on pipes. Source: Insulators Local 49

Now, we know where the legend of the salamander’s toxicity comes from, but what about this resistance to fire? It’s unlikely to be a product of folks just tossing them into bonfires, but instead inspired by salamanders in fact spontaneously arising from flames. You see, these amphibians take shelter in rotting logs, which provide them not only protection from predators but protection from desiccation. Ancient peoples likely often found themselves tossing logs into the fire, only to see salamanders legging it out of there, as if being born from flame.

While the legend of the fireproof salamander died with the observations of learned folks like Browne, it survives today in popular culture—and in logos, of all places. The International Association of Heat and Frost Insulators and Allied Workers, for instance, still has a salamander sitting calmly over a flame in its logo, a hint of the days when its members used asbestos before the fiendish stuff was banned in the US the 1970s.

So hooray for progress, both in public health and our understanding of zoology. The poor salamander never deserved such scorn, except that one I had as a kid that bit me once. He was a jerk, and I don’t miss him at all.